By Diana Brement,
JTNews Columnist
The Seattle Film Institute observes its 15th anniversary this year, according to founder and executive director, David Shulman. He made 1994 “the birthday of the school” because it was “the first time we had a brochure that was put out to the public.”
Before that, classes were held in David’s living room, or in rented space on Capitol Hill, with students whose names David had informally collected — sometimes on the backs of napkins. When he had enough interest, he would form a class or if the subject was outside his area of expertise, he’d find another teacher.
“There’s always been a side of the school that is driven by the needs of the students,” he says. Originally classes were held at night, but many students wanted more.
“Students…would come to me and say, “˜why should we wait until 7:00 at night? We’re already tired and now we’re starting school.’ At that point I designed a full-time program, a 40-week total immersion” in filmmaking.
This continues to be the school’s “anchor, our niche,” attracting students from the U.S. and overseas, along with evening classes and two-week teen programs.
Completing the full-time program makes students competitive for jobs in the film industry. David recently founded a sister East Coast school, the Carolina Film Institute.
SFI students tended to have college degrees, but wanted to shortcut traditional grad school. These days, more are now coming directly from high school, making it a vocational institute of sorts. These kids “have a passion for filmmaking and they…want to get out in the real world,” David says.
Growing up in Seattle, David attended Roosevelt High School, Columbia University and University of Southern California. Growing up, his family went to Temple Beth Am and he, his wife Smadar Friedlander and their 17-year-old daughter Talia still belong there.
Talia was very much a part of the SFI’s beginning — although she might not remember. “I would have a class in the living room,” recalls David, laughing, “and she’d wander in and say, “˜Abba teaching?’ and then she’d toddle off.”
Learn more about the school, its faculty and alumni at seattlefilminstitute.com. There may still be some summer teen sessions available for your budding filmmaker.
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Mercer Island native Mark Rose spent a long time working in the music industry in Seattle. Unfortunately, he spent many of those years involved with drugs and alcohol. About 10 years ago, “I woke up one day, miserable, in my early 40s, and checked myself into rehab.”
As he recovered, the music business became less appealing, and he decided to return to school to study chemical dependence treatment. He moved back to Seattle in January to start a private practice.
Mark began producing rock shows when he was just 20 and still in college. Rising in the rock world for the next decade he produced “shows of all the great artists of the ’60s and ’70s,” working up to huge “arena rock” shows for bands such as Styx and Foreigner.
Wanting to travel less, he switched to the record business, promoting albums for 15 years, working with a number of major record labels, snaring “some of the premiere jobs up here.”
Fortunate to be in Seattle during the grunge era, “I worked with a lot of Seattle artists in the ’90s,” he says, meeting many before their bands got “really big.”
But for someone with a predisposition to addiction, the drug and alcohol-fueled rock ‘n’ roll world provided way too much access to, well, alcohol and drugs, licit and illicit.
(Mark and I had to, of course, talk about Michael Jackson. “They can get what they want, and people are afraid to confront them,” says Mark of mega-stars, because they are a source of so much money. It’s a “sad, ongoing story” in the music industry.)
Now with a degree in treating chemical dependence and in private practice in Seattle, Mark offers both individual and group counseling, treating clients who refer themselves and those returning from residential treatment.
Growing up, Mark’s family belonged to Sephardic Bikur Holim and he went to Hebrew school three times a week at Ezra Bessaroth until his Bar Mitzvah. When he’s not working — and he admits he’s been pretty busy starting his own business — he likes to ski and take spinning (cycling) classes. He’ll soon be getting married to Lisa Sampsel, who he met in school three years ago, calling her his “college sweetheart.”
Mark also has a passion for Paris, which he has visited annually for 20 years, even living there for a short time.
“There are a lot of Jews in Paris,” he points out, and “a big Sephardic population,” mainly from North Africa (Sephardim in Seattle come mainly from Turkey and Rhodes). “Their food is so great!”
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Norm and Penny Leopold, formerly of Seattle, now living in Sun Valley, Id., wrote to tell us that their daughter, Sydney, recently graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in the Commonwealth Honors College and the Isenberg School of Management.
Sydney will stay back east where Hanover Insurance has hired her for their two-year management training program in Worcester, Mass.